I do not remember when I first realised that the flesh-and-blood Sherlock Holmes I knew so well was to the rest of the world merely a figment of an out-of-work medical doctor's powerful imagination. What I do remember is how the realisation took my breath away, and how for several days my own self-awareness became slightly detached, tenuous, as if I too were in the process of transmuting into fiction, by contagion with Holmes. My sense of humour provided the pinch that woke me, but it was a very peculiar sensation while it lasted.
Now, the process has become complete: Watson's stories, those feeble evocations of the compelling personality we both knew, have taken on a life of their own, and the living creature of Sherlock Holmes has become ethereal, dreamy. Fictional.
Amusing, in its way. And now, men and women are writing actual novels about Holmes, plucking him up and setting him down in bizarre situations, putting impossible words into his mouth, and obscuring the legend still further.
Why, it would not even surprise me to find my own memoirs classified as fiction, myself relegated to cloud- cuckoo-land. Now there is a delicious irony.
Nonetheless, I must assert that the following pages recount the early days and years of my true-life association with Sherlock Holmes. To the reader who comes upon my story with no previous knowledge of the habits and personality of the man, there may be some references that pass by unseen. At the other end of the spectrum are the readers who have committed whole sections of the Conan Doyle corpus (a particularly appropriate word here) to memory. These readers may find places at which my account differs from the words of Holmes' previous biographer, Dr. Watson, and will very probably take offence at my presentation of the man as being someone totally different from the "real" Holmes of Watson's writings.
To these latter I can only say that they are quite right: The Holmes I met was indeed a different man from the detective of 22IB Baker Street. He had been ostensibly retired for a decade and a half, and was well into his middle age. More than this, however, had changed: The world was a different place from that of Victoria Regina. Automobiles and electricity were replacing hansom cabs and gaslights, the telephone was nosing its obtrusive self into the lives even of village people, and the horrors of war in the trenches were beginning to eat at the very fabric of the nation.
I think, however, that even if the world had not changed and even if I had met Holmes as a young man, my portraits of him would still be strikingly different from those painted by the good Dr. Watson. Watson always saw his friend Holmes from a position of inferiority, and his perspective was always shaped by this. Do not get me wrong — I came to have considerable affection for Dr. Watson. However, he was born an innocent, slightly slow to see the obvious (to put it politely), although he did come to possess a not inconsiderable wisdom and humanity. I, on the other hand, came into the world fighting, could manipulate my iron-faced Scots nurse by the time I was three, and had lost any innocence and wisdom I once may have had by the time I hit puberty.
It has taken me a long time to find them again.
Holmes and I were a match from the beginning. He towered over me in experience, but never did his abilities at observation and analysis awe me as they did Watson. My own eyes and mind functioned in precisely the same way. It was familiar territory.
So, yes, I freely admit that my Holmes is not the Holmes of Watson. To continue with the analogy, my perspective, my brush technique, my use of colour and shade, are all entirely different from his. The subject is essentially the same; it is the eyes and the hands of the artist that change.
— M. R. H.
BOOK ONE: APPRENTICESHIP
The Beekeeper's Apprentice
ONE: Two shabby figures
The discovery of a sign of true intellect outside ourselves procures us something of the emotion Robinson Crusoe felt when he saw the imprint of a human foot on the sandy beach of his island.
I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defence I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915. In my seven weeks of peripatetic reading amongst the sheep (which tended to move out of my way) and the gorse bushes (to which I had painfully developed an instinctive awareness) I had never before stepped on a person.
It was a cool, sunny day in early April, and the book was by Virgil. I had set out at dawn from the silent farmhouse, chosen a different direction from my usual — in this case southeasterly, towards the sea — and had spent the intervening hours wrestling with Latin verbs, climbing unconsciously over stone walls, and unthinkingly circling hedgerows, and would probably not have noticed the sea until I stepped off one of the chalk cliffs into it.
As it was, my first awareness that there was another soul in the universe was when a male throat cleared itself loudly not four feet from me. The Latin text flew into the air, followed closely by an Anglo-Saxon oath. Heart pounding, I hastily pulled together what dignity I could and glared down through my spectacles at this figure hunched up at my feet: a gaunt, greying man in his fifties wearing a cloth cap, ancient tweed greatcoat, and decent shoes, with a threadbare Army rucksack on the ground beside him. A tramp perhaps, who had left the rest of his possessions stashed beneath a bush. Or an Eccentric. Certainly no shepherd.
He said nothing. Very sarcastically. I snatched up my book and brushed it off.
"What on earth are you doing?" I demanded. "Lying in wait for someone?"
He raised one eyebrow at that, smiled in a singularly condescending and irritating manner, and opened his mouth to speak in that precise drawl which is the trademark of the overly educated upper-class English gentleman. A high voice; a biting one: definitely an Eccentric.
"I should think that I can hardly be accused of 'lying' anywhere," he said, "as I am seated openly on an uncluttered hillside, minding my own business. When, that is, I am not having to fend off those who propose to crush me underfoot." He rolled the penultimate r to put me in my place.
Had he said almost anything else, or even said the same words in another manner, I should merely have made a brusque apology and a purposeful exit, and my life would have been a very different thing. However, he had, all unknowing, hit squarely on a highly sensitive spot. My reason for leaving the house at first light had been to avoid my aunt, and the reason (the most recent of many reasons) for wishing to avoid my aunt was the violent row we'd had the night before, a row sparked by the undeniable fact that my feet had outgrown their shoes, for the second time since my arrival three months before. My aunt was small, neat, shrewish, sharp-tongued, quick-witted, and proud of her petite hands and feet. She invariably made me feel clumsy, uncouth, and unreasonably touchy about my height and the corresponding size of my feet. Worse, in the ensuing argument over finances, she had won.
His innocent words and his far-from-innocent manner hit my smouldering temper like a splash of petrol. My shoulders went back, my chin up, as I stiffened for combat. I had no idea where I was, or who this man was, whether I was standing on his land or he on mine, if he was a dangerous lunatic or an escaped convict or the lord of the manor, and I did not care. I was furious.